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Sunday, 29 January 2012

Buying a pushchair on a budget

During the Christmas holidays the hubby and I decided it might be time to start looking for a pushchair for our impending bundle of joy. You might think this would be fairly easy task, but with so many options out there and a tight budget we were extremely confused.
We spent literally hours trawling the internet trying to find the right pushchair for us. I thought I would share the process with you in the hope that it helps you find the right pushchair for you.

First we thought about what we needed from a pushchair, this helped eliminate many many pushchairs from the market. Three of the key things we decided we wanted were:

An all terrain pushchair because we like going for long walks,
A travel system so that we could use the same frame for a car seat, pram and pushchair which would save us both space in the house, and money,
Both forward and rear facing seat options.

By picking out the key things we needed from our pushchair we could limit our search and save a lot of time. Knowing what we wanted helped us to navigate around other websites because we could enter specific things into their searches such as "all terrain" and "rear facing seat option".

Next we logged onto the "Which" website and looked at all their ratings for the sort of pushchairs we were looking for. The pushchair that had everything we wanted and came up the best in the ratings was the ICandy Apple Jogger. Strangley, it was impossible to find an online proce for this pushchair so we went to John Lewis for a quote. Shockingly for everything we needed we would have to fork out over £800 which was way over our budget. However we did not lose hope, we began looking for a second hand option by searching on Ebay, Gumtree and Preloved. We found two pushchairs that were local to us, one was brand new (including the car seat), but in a limited edition fabric which meant the owner was asking for £600, which we felt was too much, the other was also the limited edition fabric, but was a couple of years old. We went to look at it and were happy, it was in very good nic, the only wear was on the tyres. So we parted with £300 for the exact pushchair we wanted that would have cost over £1000 new (due to the limited edition fabric). This pushchair didn't have a car seat so we looked online for the cheapest place to get the carseat that would fit with this pushchair, also checked it out on the "Which" website to make sure it had a good safety rating, and went for the Maxi-cosi Cabriofix from Mothercare for £100. So all in all we saved a lot of money and got a very nice pushchair. We could have got a brand new pushchair for this £400, but it wouldn't have been everything we wanted and needed, I think that making the compromise of buying second hand was a really good choice for us and one I would recommend for others.

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